722
PARTISAN REVIEW
The first great achievement is to have held the Congress in
Berlin and to have strengthened the feeling of solidarity with those still
struggling for freedom under conditions hard to imagine by Western
intellectuals.
The second is to have created a nucleus for a Western community
of intellectuals who will have no truck with "neutrality" in the struggle
for freedom either at home or abroad.
Its Manifesto of Freedom expresses the least common denominator
of democratic faith for individuals who differ about specific political
and economic programs.
Its Message to the East brings assurance to intellectuals beyond the
Iron Curtain that they are not forgotten, that the conflict of our time as
seen by their colleagues on this side, is not a conflict between East and
West but between free thought and enslavement.
An international committee
o~
twenty-five, under an executive com–
mittee of five: Silone, Koestler, ...
~ousset,
Schmid and Brown, plans to
organize the Congress on a permanent basis to do, among other things,
the following:
1. Issue a series of White Books, along the lines proposed by Silone,
giving a documented picture of the Writer, Artist and Scientist in coun–
tries behind the Iron Curtain.
2. Organize aid for those intellectuals who escape from totalitarian
countries.
3. Inaugurate a special series of radio talks "Dialogues Across the
Curtain" consisting of open letters to the Communist leaders of cultural
fronts in satellite countries.
4. Aid in the establishment of a university center, somewhere in
Europe, for exiled Eastern professors and students.
A half dozen other projects of a practical kind have been outlined
whose fulfillment depends upon the extent to which intellectuals of the
West rally to the call of the Congress.
The weaknesses of the Congress are obvious. It is not yet sufficiently
representative. More literary men and scientists must be drawn into the
struggle for freedom. It must concern itself not only with the main
danger to free culture from the Communist East
b~t
also to the dangers
in the imperfectly free cultures of the democratic West. Without ceasing
to be political in the basic Aristotelian sense, its work must be more
analytical.
It
must dramatize its existence until not only the intellectuals
of the world become aware of it but the statesmen of the free countries
whose policies on cultural matters the Congress should evaluate in an
independent and critical spirit.
